Film Carew's Guide To The 2017 Sydney Film Festival

The Sydney Film Festival starts this week, taking over the Harbour City’s cinemas for 12 days, and delivering an assorted array of cinematic riches.

Here, to help you navigate the program, is your Old Bean Film Carew’s guide to SFF; everything — all 35 films — I’ve seen so far.

78/52

You can get a tip-off to just how nerdy Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary shrine to the shower scene from Psycho is by its title, an oblique reference to the number of camera set-ups (78) and cuts (52) employed in making one of cinema’s most immortal sequences. Philippe collects, of course, endless talking heads, but is most interested in cinematic grammar; in the framing, editing, and sound design employed, and the moral implications lingering in Hitchcock’s storytelling decisions.

ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL

If you find it impossible to imagine a bank as a sympathetic cinematic entity, Steve James’ sterling documentary charts the indictment of Abacus, a community bank in New York’s Chinatown. After Abacus reports one of its workers for loan fraud, the entire bank is indicted on specious claims, in a show trial staged as pure PR stunt. Watching the noble, hard-working Sung family dragged through five years of legal proceedings, James summons the appropriate rage at justice misdirected: the Wall Street wankers who authored the housing-bubble financial meltdown were never taken to court, only awarded $14 trillion in bailout cash.

AMA-SAN

In Cláudia Varejão’s observationist documentary, we witness the modern-day routines of the Japanese women upholding an ancient practice: diving for abalone and sea urchins, with a knife in their hands and a lungful of air. Routines that are, largely: really slowly getting into and out of wetsuits, gardening, and singing karaoke.

AN INSIGNIFICANT MAN

It's billed as a 'political thriller', but this documentary is, instead, a behind-the-scenes chronicle of Arvand Kejriwal, the rank outsider whose Common Man's Party rose from fledgling idea to political powerhouse in the space of a year. The film essentially weighs up the same moral concern as Kejriwal himself must: is it possible to remain an idealist in the political world?

AUSTERLITZ

T-shirt slogans seen on tourists blithely ambling through the remains of the Dachau concentration camp: ‘Fuckin’ 99 Problems’, ‘Cool Story Bro’, ‘Hugs and Pugs’, ‘Life was more relaxed when Apples and Blackberries were just fruits’, and, seriously, ‘Fucking Fuck Happens’. Ukrainian documentarian Sergei Loznitsa sets up his static camera at the site of horrifying human atrocities and patiently watches on. Being swarmed by milling masses — with their selfie sticks, annoying ringtones, and air of general disinterest — the feeling is part amusement-park crowd, part school excursion, Loznitsa’s silent judgment on the commodification of tragedy-tourism sounding loud.

BLUE

Few angry documentaries about global injustice are as beautifully shot as Karina Holden’s marine conservation doc Blue. Whether shooting from Eye-of-God high or deep under the ocean, Holden’s film abandons the usual talking-heads-and-teletyped-facts approach for something more widescreen, beautiful. This serves to sugar the pill — its eco-minded message widely accessible — and introduces a sense of savage irony: the high-def, vivid images capturing the majesty of the ocean, but also the horrors of shark culls, the seabird stomaches filled with plastic, and the slurry of rubbish washing up on Pacific shores.

CHAVELA

Chavela Vargas is a towering figure in Latin-American culture: a queer icon, a defiant female voice throughout the 20th century, a singer whose music of “the wounded soul” found her rubbing shoulders (and other bits) with everyone from Frida Kahlo to Pedro Almodóvar. But, in bringing her story to screen, directors Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi submit to all the old rockumentary staples.

EMBER

In this slow, sombre, tautly composed pic from Turkish auteur Zeki Demirkubuz, a classic melodrama is dressed in minimalist threads. Here, a single mother, her deadbeat absent-father husband, and his ex-boss fall into a love-triangle, brought together by desire, the need for cash, and the textiles industry. Demirkubuz uses the competing attentions of two men — one violent, the other wealthy — as symbolic pillars of Turkish patriarchal oppression.

THE FOREST OF LOST SOULS

An early reference to Nick Hornby’s Don’t Look Down — not to mention the line “this stupid film is my suicide note” — duly sounds the alarm-bells in this dire, witless film. It may be a black-and-white Portuguese picture showing at an international film festival, but this is a horror film that’s utterly generic, with a very lame villain and barely enough ideas to make it to its 70-minute run-time.

GAME OF DEATH

This cheery, leery splatter-fest has an elevator-pitch premise — an evil board-game traps a group of teens in a kill-or-be-killed nightmare — that it, gladly, knows not to drag out past 70 minutes. Canadian director-pair Baz Morais and Sébastian Landry lace their genre-work with oddball comedy and social commentary, but the film is most interesting when it turns itself over to a mixed-media montage eyeballs-deep in fetishry for dated video/video-game/video-clip effects.

GRADUATION

It doesn’t measure up to his masterwork 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, nor stir up anything approaching the creepiness of Beyond The Hills. But the latest film for Cristian Mungiu — in which a father wants nothing more than for his daughter to be able to study abroad — is another stirring, suffocating drama, where Romanian society is a sinkhole, dragging regular people into the darkness.

HOLY AIR

In this deadpan Israeli comedy, a down-on-his-luck father-to-be in Nazareth comes up with a duly-symbolic get-rich-quick scheme: shilling ‘Holy Air’, bottled atop the biblical summit of Mount Precipice, to the endless parade of Christian tourists. Director Shady Srour matches his droll premise to geometric, symmetrical frames, making it just as artful as it is satirical.

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

“The story of the negro in America is the story of America,” intones James Baldwin. “It is not a pretty story.” Raoul Peck’s outraged documentary sets Baldwin’s words, and archival interviews of him talking, against footage of protests, from Birmingham to Ferguson. The most amazing, shocking archival images are of unrepentant racists in the Deep South, protesting integration, the open wounds of American history, but a half-century old, left raw.

INSYRIATED

Hiam Abbas plays a Syrian matriarch trying to keep an ad-hoc family together in this smartly-penned drama from Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw. Three generations of friends, family, and neighbours are holed up together in one apartment in Damascus, hiding from the gunfire and air raids outside. In many ways, Insyriated is a classic invasion thriller, in which the home-space must be protected from interlopers, be they militia, police, or looters. But it also percolates with trenchant theme and humane sensibility, working a simple, profound picture of people trying to preserve some modicum of domestic normalcy in the face of the horrors of war.

KING OF THE BELGIANS

Belgian filmmakers Brosens & Woodworth made one of this century’s greatest unseen films, 2006’s Khadak. Here, however, they deliver only a disappointing mockumentary. Its premise is great: Wallonia and Flanders secede from the union, making Belgium’s ceremonial royal figurehead even more useless. He’s in Turkey on an EU photo-op at the moment of crisis, and, sadly, what then unfolds is a roadtrip filled with kooky caricature, but little satirical bite.

LADY MACBETH

It sounds like period-piece cliché: a headstrong, ahead-of-her-days woman, in 19th-century England, is sold into a loveless marriage, only to undertake a passionate affair with the dirty, sexy groomsman while her husband’s away. But rather than a revisionist fantasy of female emancipation, director William Oldroyd delivers a dark psychodrama, watching on with cool removal at both enflamed passion and its heroine’s descent into depravity and skulduggery.

LAST MEN IN ALEPPO

“We’re going to die like everyone else here,” says one of the White Helmets in Feras Fayyad and Steen Johannessen’s unbelievable documentary. In the war-ravaged Syrian city, this handful of activists go out in the wake of bombings to dig out survivors — and the dead — from the rubble, the film built from astonishing on-the-ground footage. Its most profound moments come when daily life — in a city under siege — turns from quotidian to terror-struck, coffee preparation or playground trips with the kids becoming harried, harrowing, when bombers are heard in the air.

THE LEVELLING

The clichés of dour, rural miserablism are on show in this po-faced British mood-piece. After the suicide of her brother, a black-sheep daughter returns to the family farm she once fled from. There, she finds a drunk dad, dead badgers, diseased cattle, and dark secrets, Ellie Kendrick wandering through the gritty-drama clichés with a permanent frownyface.

LIBERATION DAY

In 2015, North Korea shocked the world by not only inviting the first-ever Western band to play in Pyongyang, but making that band Laibach, the Slovenian industrial-rockers whose militaristic music was born as a parody of Eastern Bloc totalitarianism. Collaborating with a Norwegian artmaker Morten Traavik and the obligatory local government minders, they stage a set of Sound Of Music covers, the whole thing bordering on farce. While the filmmaking — by Traavik and Uģis Olte — is rarely inspired, Liberation Day provides a front-row seat to an unlikely summit of cultural exchange.

MANIFESTO

Beginning life as a bonkers video-art installation at ACMI in Melbourne, Manifesto now gets a less-cacophonous, more-linear big-screen version. Julian Rosefeldt's work finds Cate Blanchett playing 13 different roles, earnestly reading aloud artists’ manifestos — from Fluxus to Dada to Dogme — in surreal, absurdist situations; as schoolteacher, newsreader, hobo, puppeteer, etc. It's a daffy art-world lark that, at the very least, serves as a shrine to Blanchett's abundant acting talents.

MCLAREN

Did you see Senna? You liked Senna, right? Well here, then, is another archival-footage-filled motor-racing documentary about a driver who died, too young, on the track. But, instead of painting its subject as a fallen saint, Roger Donaldson — the Kiwi filmmaker who once helmed the 1988 Tom Cruise barney Cocktail — instead shows Bruce McLaren as a wry, smirking, one-of-the-boys type, who loved the ins-and-outs of engineering as much as the competition of driving.

MOTHERLAND

Filipino documentarian Ramona S. Díaz takes her cameras into the 'busiest maternity ward in the world', in a Manila hospital servicing the city's teeming, unwashed masses. When it's the site of the arrival of the Philippines’ 100 millionth citizen, you get a sense of its grand-scale numbers, but Díaz's documentary is far more intimate: drawn to first-time mothers, and the parents of premature babies who have to incubate their newborns by wearing them pressed against their chests around the clock.

MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI

With its oddball animated look, all quirky tykes with big heads and colourful noses, My Life As A Zucchini scans as mere kids-movie fodder. But, with a screenplay written by the great Céline Sciamma — who, through Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood, and the script for André Téchiné’s Being 17, has proven to be cinema’s great chronicler of adolescence — what you actually get is a rarely cutesy, deeply human portrait of troubled children living in a foster home.

NEWTON

In the Indian election, everyone gets a vote: even illiterate villages in the war-torn jungles of Chhattisgarh. Amit Masurkar's wry black comedy is both satire of and shrine to the democratic process, mocking PR-minded photo-ops while authoring an unironic valentine to the volunteers and bureaucrats who make election days possible.

THE OPPOSITION

After being pulled from Sydney last year in a cloud of legal turmoil, Hollie Fifer's documentary of community New Guinean resistance in the face of big developers now hits screens. And the woman whose lawsuit derailed its 2016 appearance, Dame Carol Kidu, plays a major part: the one-time defender of the put-upon becoming a fascinating, polarising figure when she turns turncoat, the fact that she doesn't like her portrayal herein no real surprise.

PHANTOM BOY

There’s a pleasing tactility — hand-drawn lines, mock pencil shadings, evocations of Cubist art — to the animation in this French cartoon. A hospital-bound boy has a wild, crime-fighting fantasy life, Phantom Boy going for eternal children’s-story thematic resonance by depicting the wonders of imagination as a respite from the harshness of the daily grind.

A QUIET DREAM

There are shades of Hong Sang-soo in this wonky, ambling comedy. A trio of small-time bros in Seoul all try to ply their charms with the same barmaid, offering a cringing commentary on male ego and entitlement. But, as with Hong, there’s also a meta-textual quality bubbling underneath, this triumvirate played by fellow filmmakers (Yang Ik-june, Park Jung-bum, Yoon Jong-bin), characters and narrative filled with references to recent Korean cinema.

SEXY DURGA

Amid evocations of Indian goddesses and footage shot on the ground at a wild village ritual (of drumming, dancing, and willing men suspended from trucks by meat-hooks), an improvised narrative about a Hindi couple attempting to flee from the rural South arises. Sanal Kumar Sasidharan contrasts his ethnographic portrait of local Kerali culture with the Northerners’ horror-movie-esque fears of these local yokels speaking their incomprehensible dialogue, and contrasts the mass worship of the goddess Durga with the shabby treatment of the woman, in the narrative, of the same name. As the runaway pair try and hitchhike to a train station, they descend into a night from hell — largely within the claustrophobic confines of one dark van — with the presence of a woman bringing out the worst in the men who encounter her.

SPOOKERS

Florian Habicht's absurdist, mythos-deflating portrait of Brit-poppers Pulp showed the Kiwi's wry approach as filmmaker. But, returning to SFF with Spookers, Habicht displays an unexpectedly sentimental side. The documentary is a chronicle of the only dedicated, year-round horror theme-park in the world, which is housed in an abandoned psychiatric hospital south of Auckland. With his inquisitive, playful questioning of its employees and actors, Habicht wants to find what brought each person in front of his camera, and what results is a sweet, emotional portrait of an ad-hoc family filled with misfits.

UNTITLED

Whether making features or documentaries, Michael Glawogger was a traveller, his films about the migratory paths of humans, especially his amazing documentary trilogy chronicling itinerate workers (Megacities, Workingman’s Death, Whore’s Glory). In making what would prove to be his final film, Glawogger sought to travel the globe, from the Balkans to West Africa, unmoored by even a simple theme. He died in 2014, in Liberia, from malaria, but the footage he shot has been assembled by his — and Michael Haneke’s — editor, Monika Willi. Her interpretive assembly of the oft-shocking images befits the lack of brief, and has its own emotional undercurrent, becoming not just a shrine to what Glawogger filmed, but to the filmmaker himself.

VAYA

A trainload of rubes from the countryside head into Johannesburg and get a harsh taste of big city life. The true stories were cribbed from people in a local writers’ workshop, which is a nice back-story for what turns out to be a pretty generic ensemble-of-interrelated-characters movie.

WHITNEY: “CAN I BE ME?”

Given the lurid details of Whitney Houston’s crack-blighted decline, you’d expect Nick Broomfield to be at his most muckrake-y in his documentary portrait of the departed soul-singer, who died in 2012 at 48 years old. Instead, Broomfield surprises by making a heartfelt valentine to Houston, and keeping himself, and his boom-mic, out of frame. The results are a kind of B-grade Amy, filled with the familiar sights of drug abuse, enabling, music-biz exploitation, bloodsucking family members, and on-stage meltdowns.

WINNIE

Pascale Lamche made the documentary Accused #1: Nelson Mandela in 2004; now, he makes the other half of a matching his/her pair. While Nelson remains, especially in death, a noble stalwart of quiet dignity, his ex-wife — Winnie Madikizela-Mandela — is a far more controversial figure: dissident, reactionary, iconoclast. And, depending on what side of the political divide you fall on, either a criminal who once lorded over the ANC like a Mafia don, or a political figure so powerful the white powers-that-be undermined her via a decades-long smear campaign. With Winnie on camera for Winnie, the doc is always going to fall onside, authoring a talking-heads-and-archive-footage portrait of an ever-defiant figure.

WOLF & SHEEP

A film made by a 25-year-old Afghani woman is bound to be a curio, at the very least. But Shahrbanoo Sadat's debut feature shows huge cinematic promise. Set in a remote mountain community of shepherds, it follows the local kids as they herd sheep, make slingshots, and play-act as adults: gossiping, swearing, smoking, and bartering bride prices. They also tell local fables, of shape-shifting wolves and green fairies; and, in inspired nocturnal interludes, Sadat breaks from the rural realism and throws her film into folkloric lyricism.

THE WORKERS CUP

Adam Sobel's documentary of migrant workers building the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup makes no bones about the horrors of their employment: they account 60% of the Qatari population, but are held against their will and have few rights, this modern-day Apartheid state called, by one of its toiling labourers, “modern slavery”. So, when the local powers-that-be (the Supreme Committee For Delivery & Legacy!) stage a football tournament between the contracting conglomerates, it's obviously a blatant PR stunt using the universal currency of soccer as misdirection. And yet Sobel — his camera finding its way into the offices, common rooms, and dorms of the workers — sees the real human benefit, and the joys that can come from sporting success.